Brian Steidle went to Darfur and came back with these photographs. One shows a one year-old girl with a lower left back ripped open by bullets. Another, the village of Um Zeifa as it is engulfed by flames. Another, a man's body lying on he parched earth in the village of Amaka Sara. And another, a human rib cage lying in a ditch outside the village of Adwa. Powerful stuff.

Brian says that trying to get someone, anyone to stop what is happening in Darfur is like "screaming in a dream." Must be.

Brian's a former Marine and was in Darfur as a government contractor.

Yesterday saw both Governor Schwarzenegger and the U.S. House passing laws as a way by which to hold the government in Khartoum responsible for the continuing violence and such in Darfur. Arnold's bill (really, Assemblyman Paul Koretz's bill, but he's not famous, now is he) AB2941 takes some concrete steps -- preventing both the state's public employees' retirement program and the teachers' retirement program from investing in any companies that conduct business in Sudan.

H.R. 3127, on the other hand, is a little less hard edged. The bill frees the President to block the assets of "any individual who the President determines is complicit in, or responsible for, acts of genocide, war crimes, or crimes against humanity in Darfur" and restrict visas to the same, push for an expansion in the African Union mission and encourage NATO to do the same, and deny Khartoum oil revenue by blocking oil tankers doing business with Sudan to enter U.S. ports.

I wish that I didn't have as many cynical bones in my body as I do, but I'll leave it to others to convince me that 3127 has some teeth and isn't a just a way for this Congress to mark a check box next to "Darfur" and move on to the next.

The Sudan Divestment Task Force has done the hard work of compiling a report on what other U.S. entities have pledged to stop doing business in and around Sudan. They're pushing an interesting model for divestment -- just targeting the companies that are doing the most business with the government of Sudan and whose withdrawal will least adversely affect the people of Sudan.

If "divestment" sounds familiar, it was of course one of the world community's responses to South African apartheid. Did it do any good there? Did it bring a quicker end to apartheid than other wise would have come? I don't know.

At the U.N. today, Condoleeza Rice reportedly wrastled other diplomats into an emergency meeting on Darfur that had as its goal finding a way to get U.N. troops on the ground, in the hopes of preventing a big disaster from turning into a really very big one. But with a slightly different take is the Arab League's Secretary General, Egypt's Amr Moussa, who has this to say:

We have suffered at certain stages of this problem of either exaggeration or misinformation. We have a major problem in Darfur, but not all what you hear, not all the information circulated, are really accurate.

If you've been following the Darfur situation then you likely may well have heard that there's a new study out that finds that the number of folks who have died in Darfur has a floor near 200,000. This is relevant because there hasn't until now been a consensus on the number of Sudanese no longer alive as a result of the Darfur violence and as a result, the authors of the study assert, the press has resorted to using the ambiguous "tens of thousands" to pin a number on the situation.

John Hagen and Alberto Palloni, sociologists at Norwestern and the University of Wisconsin respectively, think that lower death estimates are flawed, in part, because they are based on the World Health Organization's rates of death amongst folks already living in displacement camps -- in other words, those more removed from the threat of violence than the broader population. So Hagan and Palloni attempted to refine the conclusions suggested by those broad WHO data sets by understanding them in a more targeted context created from data gathered by Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders in five actual West Darfur camps. That's where they came up with the minimum of 200,000 deceased number, along with a figure of one million additional people displaced by the violence. The Hagan/Palloni study appears in full in this month's issue of Science magazine, available to non-subscribers for the price of $10. But I just told you what's in it.

The African Union announced today that it will extend the mandate of its 7,000 troop force in Darfur through the end of the year, a extension that Khartoum is expected to accept. Part of the extended mandate will include new funding from the Arab League. President Bashir is keeping up his opposition to the idea of a larger U.N. force coming in and replacing the A.U. troops, now calling the plan nothing more than a "Zionist plot" intended to "help Israel."

The Genocide Intervention Network has a new site up called Darfur Scores that letter grades members of Congress on how they voted on various House and Senate legislation. It's a bit strangely organized though, by congressional district, so if you don't happen to know which one you happen to you live in, you can figure that out here. My old boss, California congressman (30th district) Henry Waxman gets an A. Course he does. Not only did he vote "aye" on all the major Darfur-related legislation going, he has also urged the University of California system to divest from Sudan (pdf).

In his speech before the U.N. General Assembly today, President Bush reiterates his take on Darfur -- if Khartoum won't allow U.N. troops in, the U.N. should find the strength it has thus far lacked to go in anyway:

To the people of Darfur: You have suffered unspeakable violence, and my nation has called these atrocities what they are -- genocide. For the last two years, America joined with the international community to provide emergency food aid and support for an African Union peacekeeping force. Yet your suffering continues. The world must step forward to provide additional humanitarian aid -- and we must strengthen the African Union force that has done good work, but is not strong enough to protect you. The Security Council has approved a resolution that would transform the African Union force into a blue-helmeted force that is larger and more robust. To increase its strength and effectiveness, NATO nations should provide logistics and other support. The regime in Khartoum is stopping the deployment of this force. If the Sudanese government does not approve this peacekeeping force quickly, the United Nations must act. Your lives and the credibility of the United Nations is at stake. So today I'm announcing that I'm naming a Presidential Special Envoy -- former USAID Administrator Andrew Natsios -- to lead America's efforts to resolve the outstanding disputes and help bring peace to your land.

It's of course fairly easy to make a funny out of an actor like George Clooney learning the U.N. Security Council, as he is scheduled to do this afternoon, but he's shown a depth of commitment on Darfur beyond what, say, I have. He spent his own time and money traveling for to the refugee camps bordering Chad (with his pops) for eight days back in April and is now exposing himself to near certain jeering for daring to go before the 'expertists' at the U.N. That's more than I've done, scaled back proportionally for my lesser fame, resources, and prettiness. So bully for him. Likewise Angelina.